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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2556 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 30, 2024

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Can someone please explain how on earth, looking at this poll of polls, why a Conservative is PM, and has been so for years and years, instead of Labour with literally double their polling average? I understand there was a flip two and half years ago, but that seems like an incredibly radical shift in such a short time. Hatred of Boris Johnson only? Was it purely how shit Jeremy Corbyn was? Post-Covid stuff? But if so, why the lag until late 2021 for this to become evident? And clearly Truss made it all permanently worse, but even before, having 10% less polling-wise then the other big party while being PM still seems pretty odd.

There hasn't been an election in five years.

I assume you're American, or familiar with the American system. Between the 2004 and 2008, the House swung from a 30 seat R majority, to a 79 seat D majority, all while a Republican President remained in office. Between the 2008 election and the 2010, Republicans would win back the House with a 49 seat majority. So in six years we saw movement for 110 seats to D, then 128 seats to R.

That volume of change isn't really that crazy in five years time, or in two.

As for the why, it's Brexit. Brits voted narrowly for Brexit, and once it had been approved a slightly-larger majority was in favor of moving forward with it. The Conservative PMs of the time didn't want to Brexit at all. They dilly-dally'd about actually getting it done, leaving the country in limbo, while Labour as a party wanted to avoid doing Brexit at all (although Corbyn was weirdly out of step and Euroskeptical). This combination lead to Boris Johnson winning with a message of doing the damn thing, running against a Labour party that never had a really good message on Brexit neither rallying to go back on it or showing any prospect of executing it.

If we're talking generic party preference polls, which I think is the UK analog for the listed poll, the US is still much more stable. If we take the Presidential popular vote margin as an indicator (though a bit faulty vs generic party preference, since personality matters, but presumably an overestimate of the real generic gap), we can see a maximum swing of 25% over four years, and that was after Nixon was impeached for Watergate (!), and a few other swings north of 20% also in the 60s, which was a major time in US history with civil rights, the Vietnam war and draft, and a ton of social unrest and violence. Since (and including) Reagan in 1984, we've seen mostly 5-10% swings. I was able to find a few links to actual generic party polling that goes back to 2012, and the largest generic ballot delta was 8% there, and it seems to roughly match within a few percent.

In contrast, we just saw a generic swing of +12 (if we're doing the actual 2019 election) to -21 in three years, for a delta of 33. Is the takeaway then that Brexit was actually earth-shattering politically? Is Brexit the UK's Vietnam?

Or (the more boring answer, but maybe just more true) is party affiliation in the UK simply unstable? I guess one explanation is simply that Reform "stole" all of the Conservative votes, that makes the totals more in line with at least the last 10 years of expected swings.

(In US-related news, a 2020 generic ballot polling average had Democrats up 7%, but 2024 the same generic ballot average is statistically tied. This looks absurdly bad for Biden.)

I don't see why the presidential popular vote is a better guide than the congressional margin, congressional margin is much closer to what is actually going on in parliamentary politics.

And I would say that Brexit is, in its own way, significantly worse than Vietnam. It depantsed the entire political class, as they were collectively found to have no plan to get the thing done or for what came after.

Well, the original poll that I posted and numbers I cited was from an opinion poll-of-polls of UK voters, not Parliament MP counts. I'm just comparing apples to apples here, with another similar poll-of-polls of US voters. Maybe a similar pattern exists for the House/Parliament, but since the next election hasn't happened yet, we don't have new MP counts to compare, so it's a moot point on that level. I guess we'll see! UK and US both use first past the post, right?

Yeah, maybe I undersold Brexit. I thought things would end up more or less becoming business as usual, but I guess that wasn't so much the case. It's interesting though, if Brexit was really the cause, there's clearly some sort of lag going on (as people sour on Brexit?) because the slide doesn't seem to have stopped with the completion of Brexit, other than a brief 3-month bump after formalization (end of 2020, right?)

Between the 2004 and 2008, the House swung from a 30 seat R majority, to a 79 seat D majority, all while a Republican President remained in office. Between the 2008 election and the 2010, Republicans would win back the House with a 49 seat majority. So in six years we saw movement for 110 seats to D, then 128 seats to R.

That's the margin, though. Not the overall total.

2020 is when net migration tripled, due to policies put in place by Boris Johnson and continued by Rishi Sunak. Conservative voters feel betrayed, so they are voting for the low-immigration Reform party instead. If you combine the vote shares of those two parties, you get around 37%, which isn't far off what Labour is getting.

Conservative popularity was declining before Johnson reinvigorated it with his charisma. But when right-wing voters discovered that he was just an open-borders extremist with a blue rosette, they turned against him.

Combine that with damage to the traditional image of competence that the party benefits from due to a failing health system, high inflation and poor economic growth, and voters don't really have any reason to vote Conservative. After all, we already had crazy-high immigration, reckless money-printing, economic stagnation and activists wokeifying institutions during a decade of Conservative government. What's the worst a Labour government could do?

This election is best understood as the Conservatives losing, rather than Labour winning.

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